I spent most of my childhood in and around a townhouse near Highway 51. You could throw a baseball from my backyard across the access road and into the south going lanes of the highway if you had a decent arm. If not, you had to stand a bit closer. Either way, the drivers seemed to resent the loud noise of the ball or apple that bounced off the side of their car. It was a shame to waste food, but sometimes there was no ball available. Anything you throw will fall apart or disappear eventually. So our youthful minds engaged in a decision making process. When practicing your pitching technique, use only the apples that have entered their golden years. You know the ones—if they came in a half gallon juice carton, it would say Extra Pulp on the side. Giving those venerable apples one last chance at relevance in the form of a suicide mission arcing out over the highway is fitting, almost patriotic if you think about it.
To be honest, any roundish fruit or vegetable will work. I once saw a cucumber rocket through the late noon sky then to present its broadside with a satisfying wallop against the passenger door of a green Eldorado sedan. After launching foodstuff at your fellow citizens, do not run back to your own apartment when the vehicle comes to a sudden stop disgorging a figure of venomous wrath. The location of your home is a secret not to be shared with possessors of righteous indignation.
You may be wondering why we would engage in such a destructive and ill-mannered activity. Well… other than the fact that we were immature, I’d have to say that we had already been provided with the notion of self-insufficiency. It seems our potential was low. We were poor people in a working class neighborhood. Nobody was rich there, though we sure coveted the lifestyle of any neighbors who'd made it into the ranks of the lower middle income.
One of the things I fantasized about having was a garage. Something to keep our bikes from getting rusty. Never mind the idea of owning a car to place in your imaginary garage. That would be the most ridiculous flight of fancy, the kind reserved for moments of carbohydrate derived near-coma while sprawled in front of the television. If it was Saturday morning, the dream of a car would never come up. There was no room in the brain for much more than the next four hours of cartoons.
And how about those cartoons? Most of the cartoons were badly animated when I was a kid and nothing to write home about when it came to the story. The modern day Batman cartoon is far better than anything similar from thirty years ago. The Simpsons are incredible compared to most television, even now. But there are still many animated programs that lack any plot and are an endless series of disjointed conflicts. The cutting edge animation seems to be most concerned with cutting. Where the Simpsons poke holes in society's windbags and elicit laughs from exaggerated examples of human interaction, other shows emphasize cruelty but offer us less irony.
Why? Well, cartoons are largely made for adults now and many shows are trying to outdo the next in shock potential. They reflect a world possessing the aspect of perpetual twilight—a foreboding place full of guilt and betrayal. That doesn't make cartoons any different from much of the other programming we are offered. Even news programs have the sickly veneer of an out-of-kilter world which has replaced the previous veneer of objectivity. Puzzled, we move within a dramatically powerful nation rife with potential, but lacking a sense of belonging.
It's like those kids who got together after school and on weekends with nothing better to do. “Let's throw crab-apples at cars. We can stand behind the fence at school and lob them at the cars coming over the hill. They'll never get us.” Somehow the elation of the moment never lasted. A sense of guilt overshadowed the enjoyment, and those of us with weak throwing arms had flashbacks to the indignity of gym class. That's where a show like The Simpsons shines. The show reveals cruelty as tragedy, rebellion without cause as stupidity and that terror is merely one element in the histories of childhood neurosis.
Predictably, older generations will scoff at the culture of the new. Always, always, there are old geezers standing outside their homes jawing with each other and halfheartedly pushing leaves around with their rakes as they lament the downfall of society. Kids...music... movies...grumble...why in my day...grumble. They may even be talking about these new cartoons. For the most part, they are just sad that they've grown old and the world is less recognizable than it once was.
Ironically, the creators of our brave new cartoons are unaware that they too are lobbing apples at phantom cars as they come over the hill. Young, old, producer, consumer. None of these groups understand the others or recognizes they are all somehow the same.
At those times when the weight of expectation is oppressive and the isolation impossible to withstand precisely because you are alone, perhaps the young and old will sit beside each other in church or at the neighborhood bar. After a few moments, likely imagining they have little in common, they sigh and agree life is hard. One will look over at the other and say, “But at least we have this place.” Startled, the other may reply, “We do?”
